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And this is the place where our folks came to work

Where they struggled in puddles, they hurt in the dirt

—Tony Walsh

“It’s coming! It’s coming!”

May Kenyon was sitting on the commode at the back of a sweet-shop, or candy store, in the small mill town of Accrington in Lancashire, England.

“Don’t be daft, May. It can’t be,” said her mum.

But May’s mum was wrong, and out popped my own mum, Doris. Doris came from the womb of May in the month of May. It was 1920, just two years after the end of the Great War. Beginnings do not get much humbler than this. For what would become the Hargreaves family, the only way now was up.

The first child in her family, and the only girl, Doris was named after a nurse who’d saved the life of Doris’s father, William Kenyon, during the flu pandemic that had swept across Europe when the gassed and wounded returned from the trenches.²⁹

Bill was my grandma’s second cousin. On her side of the family tree, there are one or two trunks where branches should be! The marriage choices for women in Accrington at the end of World War I were sparse. Seven years younger than my grandma, half-deaf as a result of bombshell damage, and congested in his lungs all his life because of mustard gas poisoning (and a habit of chain-smoking Woodbine cigarettes), Bill was one of the town’s lucky soldiers who had returned from the war alive and relatively intact.